


know what it is to grow

by theatrythms



Series: i'll tell you my sins (and you can sharpen your knife) [6]
Category: Fire Emblem Series, Fire Emblem: If | Fire Emblem: Fates
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gang World, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Gen, Hospitals, Mentions of Violence, Survivor Guilt, Title from a Hozier Song, mentions of drug abuse, mildly graphic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-13
Updated: 2020-07-13
Packaged: 2021-03-05 06:01:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,068
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25249564
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theatrythms/pseuds/theatrythms
Summary: Sakura, a fully qualified doctor, specializing in emergency medicine, can recognize and knows how to treat a drug overdose when she sees one, effectively.(She also knows how he got the drugs, and that is both unrelated and related to her career as a doctor.)
Relationships: Kazahana | Hana & Sakura & Tsubaki | Subaki, Ryoma & Hinoka & Takumi & Sakura
Series: i'll tell you my sins (and you can sharpen your knife) [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1668334
Kudos: 3





	know what it is to grow

**Author's Note:**

> i meant to post this WEEKS ago . hope everyone is safe ! title is from 'run' by hozier !

_ Shirasagi - 2017 _

The only way Sakura can tell she's breathing is not by the rise and fall of her chest, but the sound of her hurried, harsh pants in her ears, along with the rushing blood. She still feels like she can't breathe, like her lungs are full and won't relent the breath. It makes her tense chest ache, and her head spins with the pressure.

“Bring it to 200!” It doesn't sound like her voice in her, this one is distant and odd. She wipes her forehead with the sleeve of her coat, and begins to charge the paddles again. She rubs them together, the electricity surging between, and with a half strangled cry she brings them back onto his chest. “Clear!”

The man’s body spasms with the shock, the electric current running down his body rapidly. Immediately, she hands the paddles to the nurse next to her, resumes pumping her clasped hands over the centre of his chest, eyes trained on the heart monitor next to him.

For three minutes, the room is silent. It makes her painfully aware of her own beating heart, as the flatline runs along the length of the screen. His heart was stopped before he even got to the hospital, clammy body covered in sweat and vomit, pupils like pinpricks in his head.

Sakura, a fully qualified doctor, specializing in emergency medicine, can recognize and knows how to treat a drug overdose when she sees one, effectively.

(She also knows how he got his drugs, and that is both unrelated and related to her career as a doctor.)

“Doctor Hoshido.”

The flatline continues against the pushes of her hands, in beat with her own heart—if she only tried again—or tried hard enough or did something different it would work, she'd just have to—

“Doctor Hoshido.” The voice is firmer now, less of a suggestion and more of an order.

She pulls her hands away from the body, the overwhelming urge to vomit or cry or maybe both pushed down as she turns to look at Doctor Yukimura, the head of the ER.

“Has someone recorded the time of death?” He asks, authority filling the room with each step he takes into it. He's been there for years, long before Sakura became a doctor and long into her relatively young time at Shirasagi general hospital.

A nurse next to Sakura nods, reciting numbers Sakura doesn't hear. She takes a large breath, lungs filling with air for what feels like the first time in minutes.

“Very well.” Yukimura looks at the body, a neutral expression on his face. He glances away seconds later, like he too, can't look too long at it. “Send for the coroner, notify family.” He takes a heaving sigh. “Do what you have to do.”

The staff all leave, and like air leaving a balloon, the tension seeps out, and into the ward of the emergency room. As she reenters, her head swims in the sound, in the people around her, the heart monitors and the wailing ambulances, the crying patients and the commands of doctors it's—

It's too loud. Sakura has learnt to mute them, and heads to the next bed when—

“Doctor Hoshido.” Yukimura’s voice cuts across the chaos, opening a chasm she didn't know could be created. “A moment?”

Sakura gulps, her pager buzzing in her pocket and her legs feeling jittery, like she's ready to run back into the throng of the action. It isn't the best time, she wants to say to him, and head back to work. She doesn't have time in between the panic and the people that need her. They're doctors, and they need patients and patients need them.

Instead, she goes with him. She doesn't even realize her feet are following him until they round a corner into an empty corridor, by the break room for the staff. The sun closes the day behind the wide skylights above them, yellow and orange sprawling against full trees that move in an airless breeze. Shirasagi’s winters are mild, but the weather doesn't stop the sun from setting early and the sun from rising late. Yukimura’s face is a hard one, lined with age and wisdom, tired of the years and their endless torrent.

This is not the first death he's seen, Sakura reminds herself. This is not the first death I have seen, she reminds herself, and it doesn’t make her feel better.

“Is everything alright?” Sakura begins. In the years she’s spent as a doctor she dropped the stutter. Her friends and family say it’s maturity, that she grew out of it, but just one day she realised there were times you had to speak and times you had to stay quiet and neither deserved for her to be tripping over her words. She decided less words and more actions. Words don’t help patients.

“You need a break.” He holds up a hand when she opens her mouth to protest. “This isn’t something to argue.”

“I don’t need a break.” She says, with as much strength as she can gather. “I need to be out there, working.”

Doctor Yukimura pinches the bridge of his nose in expiration. “I’m aware of your brilliance as a doctor, truly.” He smiles at her, gently, like when he would when he was her mother’s closest friend and she was just a kid, clinging to the soft linen of Mikoto’s suit jacket. Before Mikoto Hoshido’s appointment as the mayor of Shirasagi and her death, she was the head of legal in Shirasagi General Hospital. She used to take her youngest stepchild to hospital when the older children were in school, and loved her, like any mother would love their child. Sakura’s birth mother died ten days after giving birth to her last child, a baby girl who couldn’t breath on her own.

(Sakura had spent a great number of days in a hospital, even before she became a doctor.)

Her mothers had a strong friendship with Yukimura, moreso for the fact that under his pristine white lab coat and cyan scribs, the mark of the Dawn Dragons lies, just under the surface.

“You remind me of Ikona every day, and just as headstrong as Mikoto. They’d be so proud of you, I do hope you know that.”

(Sakura has been hoping that ever since she began medical school.)

His expression sobers. “But Mikoto won’t forgive me if I let you work yourself to death.”

“Doctor Yukimura-”

“Sakura.”

It's as if the exhaustion of the last few hours, days, years collapses on her. She sees the man’s body, wrought with moisture, still, unmoving. When she saw his body she saw the blood flow stopped, with a heart and all its four chambers never to beat again.

She sighs, leaning against the dark blue wall, shoulders falling, as if she’d fold into herself. The rushing in her ears stops, and for a long, hard moment, she wonders will her heart stop too.

(It feels like it will.)

“I’ve already called Hana and Subaki to pick you up.” Yukimura’s gentle smile returns only this time it's laced with pity. Sakura wants to shove it back down his throat. 

She’s a doctor, she’s a Dawn Dragon, she won’t be pitied.

_ “I don’t have to get one, do I?” _

_ Ryoma winced, rubbing the scruffy stubble of his chin. She remembers the darkness closing in around them. She remembers Ryoma crossing the line between big brother and clan leader. She remembers closing her eyes tightly, because if she couldn’t see then maybe it wasn’t happening. _

_ “I’m sorry Sakura, you’re a Dawn Dragon, you need to get one.” _

_ “She’s only fourteen!” Takumi’s voice emerged from the other side of the room. Like an anchor. _

_ “And I was thirteen. She has a duty.” _

_ When she opened her eyes she saw Hinoka smiling sadly. “It’ll heal, I promise you.” _

_ Orochi’s needle buzzed for a slight second, whirling in the small room. _

_ It did heal, it just took some time, and if there’s too much pressure the left side of her ribcage aches, and sometimes the red ink looks too much like blood. _

She’s a goddamn Dawn Dragon.

-

She showers at the hospital, changes into her spare clothes, and heads to the main foyer of the hospital, She passes Azama at the nurse’s station, and his odd grin farewell.

Hana and Subaki are at the door, sitting in the old waiting room on low couches. The sky outside is completely dark, night shrouding and fallen and Sakura can hear the sirens pulsing outside.

Her retainers rise when they see here, concern hidden in their faces, but they’re there. Her retainers are loyal and lovely people, who care gratuitously for her, even when she feels she doesn’t deserve it.

“Thank you for coming.” She says, as she shrugs on her denim jacket. Her hair is still wet for the shower, and before it the strands were plastered to her face, sweat clinging to the back of her neck, and the single clip she wore to keep her fringe out of her face was sliding out.

She feels cleaner now. All but her hands.

Hana swats at the air, chirping. “Of course we’re here, why wouldn’t we be?”

Hana, who looks older than her thirty three years, is as tired and as worn as a childless mother would be.

“I brought the car to take you home, instead of the bike, so there’s room for us all.” Subaki’s sound voice is unwavering, always like a pillar to hold everyone up.

Hana glares at him. “Of course your car has more room!”

Subaki laughs, high and haughty as always, and wraps one strong arm around Sakura. “I jest, I jest, Lady Sakura knows this.”

Hana joins him, lacing her fingers with Sakura’s, letting their joined hands sway between them, as they walk towards the car park.

Sakura clings to them.

-

Sakura barely makes three steps into her apartment when her legs give out under her. Subaki is locking the door when she falls into Hana’s arms. She’s still awake, but doesn’t move, like she’s trapped in herself, with her blood running through her heart in slow, harsh beats.

They carry her to the bed, where her ground floor apartment is growing a garden that lives and breathes, even in the winter months. Her bed lies next to the double doors of the garden, where summer days she sits and reads, or studies. In the sunlight her home is inherently her’s; lovely, and bright, in soft shades of pink and creams.

But in the night, it feels unrecognisably cold.

“Stay.” Is all she says, blanket pulled over her, shoes off, and eyes heavy. They’re open, against her will.

Her retainers lie next to her. Hana faces her, with Subaki at her back. In true tradition, their dragons are on their chests, Subaki’s slightly higher up his torso thanks to his flat chest, but Hana and Sakura’s are on their ribcage, just under their beating hearts. The same position. Easy to hide but ever present. A reminder carved into skin that Sakura so desperately wants to crawl out of. Retainers took the same position of their liege, another layer of devotion, another sign that showed who they belonged to and exactly where they belonged.

“It’s our fault.”

When the chaos of the emergency room is gone, she’s just left with herself. Maybe if she works hard enough she’ll be able to feel at peace.

“A man today he had, he had-” she stutters out, for what feels like the first time in years. “He had an over-overdose.”

  
  


Her voice drops, as the shame crawls its way out her mouth and into the room above her. “He must’ve got it from us.”

_ “It might hurt a bit, but Orochi’s the best we’ve got.” Ryoma had informed her, a cigarette hanging loosely from his lip. _

_ Orochi’s breath was heavy with vanilla, from the cigar she put out before readying the needle. On her arms, roses and camellias bloomed, all along her smooth skin to where her shoulder joints rolled. “Just relax sweetie. I’ll take extra care of you.” _

_ Her eyes just slid closed. _

There was nothing Hana and Subaki could say to ease the guilt. Hana just cups her face, singing slowly to soothe her pain and to soothe her heart and Subaki just holds her closer.

Her eyes slide closed.

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading !


End file.
